This is a simple utility for artists.

The basic idea is to simulate a figure drawing class with timed poses. Going to a real, live session with a real model is obviously ideal, but not always practical. With this utility, you point it at a directory of images or an Atom feed (eg, from Flickr) and tell it how long "poses" should last and it displays random images from that source for a while until you stop it. It also shows you a countdown timer in the corner so you actually know how much time you have left for that pose.

Basic Example Usage:

% zeuxis.py 300 ~/images/poses/*.jpg

That will tell it to draw random images from your "~/images/poses/" directory and do 5 minute (300 seconds) poses. Hit 'q' to exit.

To pull images from an Atom feed:

% zeuxis.py 300 -u 'http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=turtle&lang=en-us&format=atom'

That will do 5 minute poses of public photos on flickr with the 'turtle' flag. (Hey, I like drawing turtles).

Some extra features are available:

• grayscale: hit 'g' to toggle grayscale vs color display (if you just want to do value studies)
• posterize: hit 'p' to cycle through several different levels of higher contrast. This is useful in the same way that squinting at a subject so you just get a sense of the big blocks of shapes. Try it in grayscale mode.
• gridlines: hit 'l' to cycle through different numbers of gridlines drawn on the image. Having a few lines up can be helpful for tricky subjects.

You can also hit 's' to skip the current image and move on to the next one.

Installation requirements:

• pygame (ubuntu: sudo aptitude install python-pygame)
• feedparser (ubuntu: sudo aptitude install python-feedparser)

Current Issues (patches welcome):

• Port to other platforms. I only run Ubuntu, so that's all I've tested it on. Python and Pygame are available elsewhere though so there's no reason it shouldn't work; I just don't have the bandwidth to do it.
• Friendlier UI/commandline parsing.
• only handles Atom feeds of a pretty narrow flavor, with fullsize images as enclosures on the entries. In particular, I don't yet have it working with Flickr's RSS feeds (you currently have to manually make sure there's a 'format=atom' in the url).
• it's not very smart about image sizes on feeds. Eg, if you're running it on a 1024x768 display, it will still try to pull down the full-size images from a flickr feed and rescale them (which can be slow) itself, rather than notice that flickr makes available images that are already closer in size to how it will want to display.
• when pulling images from feeds, it should probably do something intelligent about pre-fetching. Currently, it doesn't download the image until it's time to display it, so you have to wait for it to download and scale to the appropriate size. It would be better if it did that in the background while the previous image is displaying so it could just quickly swap over without a delay.
• doesn't handle multiple monitors very well. It tries to fullscreen across all of them, but should probably limit itself to one monitor.
• I guess a non-fullscreen mode might be useful to some people.
• I wish I knew how to disable screensavers and monitor power-saving mode while it's on.